


III. Coming Home

by notablyindigo



Series: The Better Half [3]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, Other, Overdose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 21:19:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1241113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notablyindigo/pseuds/notablyindigo





	III. Coming Home

Thirty-one days, thirty-five meetings, ten cheek swab tests, and six separate searches for hidden stashes. One overdose. Eventually, Joan will come to understand Mikki’s relapse as inevitable, but today isn’t that day. She wonders as she packs up the last of her belongings whether her past few clients had spoiled her; it had been months since she’d last had to call an ambulance.

She tows her bags out of Mikki’s apartment and locks the door behind her, leaving the key under the mat, then takes her things out to the sidewalk and flags a cab. The driver, a spry man in his fifties, leaps out to help her get everything into the trunk. Joan slides into the back and catches the cabbie’s eyes in the rear view mirror.

“7th Avenue and Carrol off of Prospect, please,” she says, and curls into the nook between the seat and the door, her cheek against the window.

“Which hotel?” he asks, already honking his horn as he pulls away from the curb and into traffic. Joan shakes her head.

“It’s not a hotel, It’s my apartment,” she says, then adds, “I was just here on a job.” He looks at her curiously and opens his mouth to comment, then appears to think better of it and turns on the radio instead. It’s the bottom of the ninth in the Mets game against the Dodgers and the score is tied, but she can’t bring herself to care. She had planned on watching the game with Ken and Hope, to make up for missing their housewarming party the week before when she’d needed to accompany Mikki to a meeting (she’d called Joan, voice shaking, saying she’d run into some old friends from her using days, that she could smell the ammonia on their clothes and wasn’t sure if she could hold out. Joan kept her on the phone during the cab ride from Manhattan to Queens, and had returned to the apartment to find Mikki in a staring contest with a small bag of crumbly white powder. Disposal, cheek swab, stash search. Rinse and repeat).

Ken and Hope would have to take another rain check, though Joan was sure they wouldn’t accept the repeated cancellation without some protest. In her hurry to get Mikki to the hospital, she’d forgotten to text Hope to cancel, and had only been reminded when Hope called to ask if she was still coming. 

"Let me guess," Hope had said tiredly, the noise of the sports bar blaring in the background, "You have a situation with a client. As usual." It had stung a bit, but not much. 

Joan is used to being a disappointment. 

\- - -

There’s only so much she can tell friends when they ask about her work. She invokes client confidentiality, but in truth, she doesn’t know how to talk to people about what she does. How do you explain to someone what it’s like to find your patient sprawled out on the kitchen floor? How do you explain the dread, the mad scramble to check their pulse, their airway? (Alive, thank god, and breathing, but hypoxic—blue lips and blue nailbeds.) None of her friends had ever performed rescue breaths on someone overdosing; you can’t explain what it’s like to recognize the acrid taste of crack smoke on someone else’s tongue. 

"You did your best, Joan," Mikki’s mother had said when they met in the ER waiting room. "We all did." But Joan was already turning over in her mind every alternate universe in which she’d been there at the right time, said the right thing, and Mikki had stayed sober. 

Mikki goes back to rehab. Joan goes back to Brooklyn.

\- - -

It turns out to be a stroke of luck that she hadn’t been able to find a subletter. She keys into her apartment, dragging her bags in behind her, and shuts the door. It’s quiet except for the whistling radiator. 

"It’s good to be home," she says to the empty dark.


End file.
